Claude Lelouch still remembers the scathing one-line review with which Les Cahiers du Cinéma, France’s most prestigious film magazine, dismissed his first feature.
It was 1961, the film was titled “Le Propre de l’Homme,” and it starred Mr. Lelouch, then 22, and a former music student, Janine Magnan, as a couple who spend a day in spring wandering around Paris. Not all the reviews were as devastating as the one in Les Cahiers, but business was dismal: 4,413 tickets sold in eight weeks. Devastated, Mr. Lelouch destroyed all the prints and took an ax to the negative.
Five years and four largely forgotten films later, the name of Claude Lelouch was indeed heard again. “A Man and a Woman,” the love story of a young widow (Anouk Aimée) and a race-car driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant), shared the top prize of the 20th-anniversary edition of the Cannes Film Festival (with Pietro Germi’s “Signore e Signori”) and quickly became one of the most successful films in French history. In the United States the film won two Oscars, for foreign film and best original screenplay, and lingered in theaters for more than two years.

Success, of course, is infinitely more difficult to forgive than failure, and Mr. Lelouch, with his taste for melodramatic extremes and grand sentiments, has been a critical punching bag ever since. But the director, now a pixieish 70 and with an amazing 41 features to his credit, seems to draw energy and resolve from critical disdain and financial adversity. In 2004 he suffered a serious disappointment when “Les Parisiens,” the first installment of a planned trilogy titled “Le Genre Humain,” was lambasted by the press and attracted a mere 300,000 spectators. He took the unreleased second installment and the unfinished third and edited them into another film, “Le Courage d’Aimer,” which did even worse.
At that moment, Mr. Lelouch said, he thought it might be time for a change. And so for his new film, “Roman de Gare” (a term corresponding to our airport novel), which opens Friday in New York, he changed his name.
“I made this film under a pseudonym,” Mr. Lelouch said, speaking softly in French during a recent visit to New York. “During the entire shoot I pretended that this was a film by someone else, so I’d be left alone. I had a wonderful time.”
Concealed behind the name of a friend, the professional tennis player Hervé Picard, Mr. Lelouch put together a small, entirely self-financed production, with the budget of an average television movie, and went to work without even the precaution of securing a distributor. When “Roman de Gare” was finished, as the producer he showed it to the organizers of the Cannes festival, Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux.
“They thought they had discovered a wonderful new young director,” he said. “It was extraordinary.” Only when the film was accepted did Mr. Lelouch reveal that he was the director, and the film’s premiere became the centerpiece of a homage offered by the festival to Mr. Lelouch’s 50 years of activity.
“Which,” Mr. Lelouch exclaimed with delight, “is exactly the story of the film.” In “Roman de Gare,” Dominique Pinon (best known to American audiences as the music-loving hit man in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 “Diva”) plays Pierre Laclos, a professional ghostwriter, a former teacher who is the secret creative force behind the best-selling author and talk show diva Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant). Driving his boss’s car from Paris to Cannes, Pierre takes pity on a hysterical young woman, Huguette (played by the newcomer Audrey Dana), who has been abandoned by her fiancé at a highway rest stop.
Huguette does not believe him when he tells her he is the true author of her favorite writer’s books, and in fact suspects that he may be “the Magician,” a psychotic killer who has just escaped from a state prison. This being a Lelouch film, chance and coincidence enter the plot, taking it in several different unpredictable directions.
“It’s a film built like a thriller, but at the same time it’s a film about creation,” Mr. Lelouch said, “in which I reveal a little bit about how I invent my stories, how I nourish myself through the people I meet. Three or four years ago I was filling up my tank at a service station when I witnessed a man and a woman having an argument. He got in his car and drove away, just leaving her there like that. I said to myself, someday I’ll make a film about that.”
Automobiles have always been central to Mr. Lelouch’s work — the white Mustang in “A Man and a Woman,” or the plot of the 1976 short, “C’était un Rendez-Vous,” in which an unseen driver (Mr. Lelouch was at the wheel) crosses all of Paris in nine minutes. “The car is a very important element in my life,” he said, “because in fact it is my office. It’s where I do my writing. I wrote ‘Roman de Gare’ on a round trip between Paris and Rome. I take my little tape recorder, and I leave behind my house, my family, my friends — because I have to be alone to write. And I let the car drive itself, without knowing where I’m going. In order to write I need to disconnect from everyday worries and everyday life, but in my car I’m constantly able to observe people, to stop at a bistro or enjoy the scenery.”
Does Claude Lelouch ever feel that he is a prisoner of Claude Lelouch? “It’s like Woody Allen or Truffaut,” he said, “When you make films regularly, people say the same things. They don’t even really see the films. It’s true that, at a certain moment, you find that you’ve made too many movies. A film by Claude Lelouch — one more — that doesn’t interest anyone, I’m afraid.
“This time I wanted to wake up the journalists a little. At my age I’ve got the right to amuse myself. And the funny thing was, I had the feeling I was making a first film.”
Da The New York Times, 20 Aprile 2008